So I was delighted to come across this clip of John and Yoko’s performance on the 1972 Jerry Lewis Telethon, even though Lennon biographer (and emeritus history professor and Nation contributor) Jon Wiener identifies this moment as the nadir of Lennon’s life in showbiz. The Nixon administration was then aggressively trying to have Lennon deported, and he and Yoko hoped the appearance would help them remain in the country, Wiener writes:

Before and after John and Yoko appeared, Jerry Lewis went through his telethon shtick, making maudlin appeals for cash, alternately mugging and weeping, parading victims of muscular dystrophy across the Las Vegas stage, and generally claiming to be the friend to the sick. Most offensive of all was his cuddling up to corporate America. Public-relations men from United Airlines, McDonald’s, Anheuser-Busch, and others appeared to hand Jerry checks. He responded by pontificating about what wonderful friends we all have in the corporations.

John and Yoko permitted themselves to be exploited in this way because they were trying to clean up their act, to impress the immigration authorities that they were good citizens. And, to be fair, many big stars went on the telethon; Paul and Ringo did in subsequent years. However, there were other points where John and Yoko could have stopped on their way from Jerry Rubin to Jerry Lewis.

Below, backed by Elephant’s Memory, John and Yoko play “Imagine,” “Now or Never,” and a reggae arrangement of “Give Peace a Chance.” Jerry Lewis blows his trumpet on the last number.

Fans of Jerry Lewis are well aware of his interest in technology, even if the stories of his inventing the video assist appear to distort the truth a trifle. For his part, publisher Al Goldstein’s best-known property was Screw, but he also developed a newsletter called Gadgets that sought to test new electronic devices on the market.

Someone had the bright idea of bringing the two men together for a segment of A.M. New York (a local competitor to the morning juggernaut of the Today program) that ran on February 23, 1976, with the assignment of introducing the viewer to a bunch of expensive devices.

The host at this time was named Stanley Siegel, and the devices are pretty amusing for being ridiculous in the era of the iPhone (which they obviously couldn’t help).

And expensive!! You could get a gold watch with a calculator on the face—for $3,900! (That’s more than $16,000 in today’s money.) How many meetings would have to be saved by instantaneously solving some simple arithmetic problem before that kind of thing would begin to pay for itself? Ditto the briefcase with a phone in it, which was priced at a relatively reasonable $2,200 (nearly ten grand today).

There’s also the most phallic corkscrew you have ever seen and a strange device filled with strips of paper that’s supposed to serve as an oracle of some sort.

Clearly, if you look at that resume, Charles can count Jerry Seinfeld, Baron Cohen, and Larry David as some of his most fertile collaborators. But he has a significant collaborator that hasn’t garnered as much notice—that being Bob Dylan. In 2003 Charles released his first directorial feature, a star-studded “comedy-drama” (per Wikipedia) called Masked and Anonymous, with Bob Dylan as number 1 on the call sheet, as they say in Hollywood (i.e., the top-billed actor). Charles directed the movie, and Dylan and Charles co-wrote it, using the pseudonyms Sergei Petrov and Rene Fontaine, respectively.

Larry Charles and Bob Dylan

But that (likely somewhat mixed-up) feature started its existence as an HBO pitch for a “slapstick comedy” TV series with Bob Dylan in the lead role—a pitch that was green-lighted after a bizarre meeting with the head of the premium cable network. Charles was on Pete Holmes’ podcast You Made It Weird recently and told the entire story. (In the podcast the story starts around an hour and 26 minutes in, but someone has helpfully created a YouTube video of that section, which we’ve embedded below.)

I’ve transcribed a couple of sections from the story, but it’s rather long (10 minutes) and suitably aimless, being a podcast. Dylan lovers should really listen to the whole thing. The story starts out as follows:

I got a call that he was interested in doing, he’d been on the road, he does this endless tour, he’s on this tour all the time, he’s on this bus, most of the time. And he’s got a TV, this was back in the ‘90s, he’s got a TV in the bus and he watches movies and he gets into certain genres of movies, and he gets like addicted to them and just watches every single one of them. And he had been watching Jerry Lewis movies. And he’d gotten deeply into Jerry Lewis, and he wanted to make a slapstick comedy. ... He wants to do it as a TV series for HBO, so I’m called in to meet with him. He wanted to star in it, almost like a Buster Keaton or something.

There’s a great section where Charles and Dylan meet in the back of a boxing gym that Dylan owns, that’s also connected to a coffee shop, and Dylan is playing mind games with Charles, whom he’s meeting for the first time, by drinking out of his guest’s ice coffee glass just to see how he’ll react. There’s also a lengthy bit about Dylan’s writing process, at least at that date—suffice it to say that it involves writing snatches of text on whatever scraps of paper are at hand and cobbling something together later on. Very “oblique strategies.” Says Charles, “We wrote like a very elaborate treatment for this slapstick comedy, which is filled with surrealism and all kinds of things from his songs and stuff.”

Eventually they go to meet with the president of HBO, Chris Albrecht. At the meeting, Charles is wearing pajamas, which was his habit for a couple of years around then, and Dylan is dressed like a cowboy, all in black. Albrecht attempts to break the ice by bringing up Woodstock, to which Dylan says (pretty reasonably), “I didn’t play Woodstock.” After that Dylan spends the entire meeting standing with his back to the group staring out the window. At this point Charles’ agent Gavin Polone leans over to Charles and whispers, referring to Dylan, “Retarded child.”

However, despite all of that, they do in fact come to an agreement on a deal to do a slapstick TV series starring, of all people, Dylan. As they’re walking out to the elevator, Charles and Polone and Dylan’s agent, Jeff Kramer, are of one mind about the project to come, but Dylan’s head is elsewhere. As Charles tells it: “The three of us are elated, we actually sold the project, and Bob says, ‘I don’t want to do it anymore. It’s too slapstick-y.’ He’s, like, not into it. That’s over. The slapstick phase is officially ended.”

So instead they worked for another year or so on Masked and Anonymous.

Back in August, Richard brought us a glimpse of some fascinating behind-the-scenes footage from one of the most fascinating movie projects in the history of cinema, the movie that we may never see, yet must see, yet maybe it’s better if we continue imagining it and never see it at all! I refer of course to Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Cried, the 1972 movie about a clown in a Nazi concentration camp that Jerry has hidden away and swears will never be seen by anyone.

At the time, Richard urged people to watch the YouTube clip NOW, because it’ll be yanked before you know it. Five months later and the clip is still up ... perhaps a sign that Jerry’s ability or desire to keep this from people is abating? We can’t know.

What we do know is that a new clip has surfaced with additional behind-the-scenes footage! And it’s tasty indeed, we get an entire scene in the process of being filmed. Jerry’s working with French actors here, so his directorial word of approval is invariably “Bon.” We get a fascinating clip of Jerry in full clown makeup in the middle of an empty big top, looking down at a pile of ashes as “Taps” plays. We also get a minute or two of Jerry working with the orchestra.

It’s a weird clip, actually. The YouTube “About” information reads in part, “This is the remainder of the footage from the full documentary, you’ve already seen the rest.” I take this to mean that the clip Richard posted in August is “the rest,” and that this second clip now completes the documentary. This YouTube file, unlike the other one, isn’t actually the documentary as much as someone filming a computer monitor that is playing the documentary—you can see the computer monitor clearly throughout, especially in the beginning as someone adjusts the frame. The monitor even has visible fingerprints on it.

In the clip below, Jerry interacts with an interviewer in a hotel room in Paris, two weeks before the production of The Day the Clown Cried. The date is March 1972. Jerry discusses the choice of Cirque d’Hiver de Paris for the location of the all-important circus in the movie, the ten years he waited before he felt he was ready to shoot the movie, and the casting of the children in the movie, among many other subjects. He also discusses his use of video playback, which (as he says) he invented sixteen years earlier. His mention of the circus as the location for the first day of shooting leads me to believe that the footage in the other two documentary clips similarly comes from early in the shoot. Much of the movie was shot in Sweden.

Interestingly, this interview clip ends with Jerry lighting a cigarette off of a candle, which (they had NO way of knowing this) is reminiscent of a gag from the August footage in which Jerry’s clown is not able to light a cigarette because the flame keeps going out just as he needs it.

The list of prominent Hollywood people who wooed J.D. Salinger for the rights to The Catcher in the Rye is long and impressive—Elia Kazan, Leonardo DiCaprio, Harvey Weinstein, Jack Nicholson, Steven Spielberg, Marlon Brando, and Billy Wilder, according to A Reader’s Companion to J. D. Salinger’s the Catcher in the Rye, by Peter G. Beidler. In 1960 Salinger told Newsweek’s Mel Eflin that he replied to one suitor, “I cannot give my permission. I fear Holden wouldn’t like it.”

One would-be Holden that stands out, partly because it’s so bizarre, is Jerry Lewis. In his 1971 book The Total Film-Maker—published, incidentally, right around the same time he was directing and starring in his legendary, seldom-seen movie project The Day the Clown Cried, to give you an idea of his state of mind—Lewis wrote:

I have been in the throes of trying to buy The Catcher in the Rye for a long time. What’s the problem? The author, J.D. Salinger! He doesn’t want more money. He just doesn’t even want to discuss it. I’m not the only Beverly Hills resident who’d like to purchase Salinger’s novel. Dozens have tried. This happens now and then. Authors usually turn their backs on Hollywood gold only because of the potential for destruction of their material. I respect them for it! Why do I want it? I think I’m the Jewish Holden Caulfield. I’d love to play it!

It’s a testament to Salinger’s writing powers that a figure like Lewis could even for a moment imagine himself in the role—perhaps his readerly identification was that strong. One wonders if Jerry really understood anything about The Catcher in the Rye. Jewish or not, the obvious problem with casting Lewis to play Holden is age. In the novel, Caulfield has been kicked out of Pencey Prep, and is thus too young for college. At the time The Total Film-Maker was published, Lewis, born 1926, was 45 years old! Compared to the age issue, even the clear tonal difficulties of representing Holden as a goggle-eyed, guffawing spaz like Lewis seem positively manageable.

Salinger’s lover and later memoirist, Joyce Maynard, wrote in her book At Home in the World that Salinger told her that “Jerry Lewis tried for years to get his hands on the part of Holden…. Wouldn’t let up.” In Maynard’s opinion, “The only person who might ever have played Holden Caulfield would have been Jerry Salinger.” It’s unclear whether this is a reference to something that almost happened: rather remarkably, at one point Salinger considered allowing a stage adaptation—“with the author himself playing Holden.”

In 1957, Salinger replied to a fan named “Mr. Howard” who had written him to inquire why the novelist had not granted permission for The Catcher in the Rye to be made into a movie. Salinger’s reply went as follows:

The Catcher in the Rye is a very novelistic novel. There are readymade “scenes”—only a fool would deny that—but, for me, the weight of the book is in the narrator’s voice, the non-stop peculiarities of it, his personal, extremely discriminating attitude to his reader-listener, his asides about gasoline rainbows in street puddles, his philosophy or way of looking at cowhide suitcases and empty toothpaste cartons—in a word, his thoughts. He can’t legitimately be separated from his own first-person technique. True, if the separation is forcibly made, there is enough material left over for something called an Exciting (or maybe just Interesting) Evening in the Theater. But I find that idea if not odious, at least odious enough to keep me from selling the rights…. And Holden Caulfield himself, in my undoubtedly super-biased opinion, is essentially unactable.

Now that Salinger is dead, the path is probably clear for the inevitable Catcher adaptation with … Michael Cera or Justin Bieber or someone.

Jerry Lewis was, and still is, a huge star in Iran. For years his voice was dubbed into Farsi for Iranian audiences by actor Hamid Ghanbari.

In the film clips below, Ghanbari captures Lewis’s infantile sing-song lilt peppered with panic-stricken blurts pretty well. He nails that distinctive sound of high-strung hysteria hitting the windshields of your mind. But in Persian.

At one time, Lewis was so big in Iran that in the dubbing of his films the dialogue was often radically changed to reflect and poke fun at events in Iranian culture. The addition of crude sexual humor was thrown into the mix to appeal to Iranian men. Lewis became such a phenomenon that his films were screened regularly during the Iranian New Year, which also happened to be the spring equinox. Imagine that: The Nutty Professor as a symbol of rebirth and regeneration.

If you’re interested in the subject (and really how could you not be?), seek out Iranian film maker Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa’s film Jerry & Me in which the director grapples with her own obsession with the American comedian. It’s a fascinating look at the ways that cultures clash and meld in odd and revealing ways.

American pop culture seeps into every corner of the planet and is interpreted in accordance with the cultures it invades and new mythologies arise from out of cliches that Americans discarded long ago or take for granted. What is shopworn for one culture may be all bright shiny and new for another.

In the Iran of my dreams, Jerry Lewis, dressed as an Easter Bunny, dances with Persophone in a perfect, candy-colored Frank Tashlin world where mosques reverberate with the repeated cries of “Heeeeeey laaaaaaady!” and an opiated Dean Martin sulks in a corner with a cocktail slowly sliding from his slack fist.

In 1971 Jerry Lewis infamously directed and starred in a film about the Holocaust titled The Day the Clown Cried. For reasons that are still unclear, Lewis chose to depart from his trademark slapstick formula and play the role of Helmut Dorque, a German circus clown who ends up leading Jewish children to the gas chamber.

The film was never finished or released for obvious reasons (not even the French were behind him on this one). Apparently Lewis has refused to talk about Clown in interviews, which I find odd—you’d figure a comedian famous for falling down and making stupid faces would jump at the chance to discuss his utterly humorless movie about a clown in a WWII German concentration camp!

In the behind the scenes footage (see below) we get a glimpse of Lewis fulfilling his duties as a director: leading the film crew, checking the cameras, and dancing around wearing a neck brace. Ambient sound has been added to enhance the overarching sense of alienation, except it isn’t really necessary because this is footage of Jerry Lewis talking to Nazis.

This slideshow of rare production stills shows a gratuitous number of photos of Lewis in full clown makeup, and to escalate the creepiness of him posing with children he presumably later leads to their deaths, the sequence is set to doo-wop music performed by Jimmy Beaumont and the Skyliners.

HELMUT
(screaming at top of voice)
Come back, damn you, come back. The
children… they’re laughing. They’re
laughing. I am a clown. I am a clown.

He turns back to the children and again bows. He quickly leans down, looks at his reflection in the puddle, and scoops up a handful of mud which he plasters on his nose to make a bulbous, artificial proboscis. He turns back to the children and in pantomime, pretends to see a fly buzzing about and tries to swat it. The imaginary fly buzzes closer.

The CAMERA MOVES UP TO—CLOSE SHOT—HELMUT

As the “fly” lands on his nose. He looks cross-eyed at the mud blob, then swats at it. The blob falls off.

To cleanse yourself of this massive, historical failure I suggest taking a shower and then watching The King of Comedy.

“With all the sensitivity you’d come to expect from the creator of The Day The Clown Cried.”

Witness the enigmatic short “BOY” made in 1993 by Jerry Lewis. Part of a portmanteau film produced by UNICEF with different filmmakers (Jean-Luc Godard made one, too). Here’s what Temple of Schlock had to say about it:

BOY is the story of the only white Jewish-looking kid in an otherwise all black world. In school, the teachers applaud the efforts (all excellent) of the other students, but Boy cannot excel. His teacher seems to be teaching the entire class, but it appears that Boy just can’t grasp the lessons. For this, he is ridiculed and humiliated by all.

That the entire scene (and the remainder of the film as well, except for one line at the end) is pantomimed recalls a similar scene from THE PATSY (1964)—a flashback to Lewis’s character being humiliated at a school dance by all the other students. Ahhh, that old Lewis bag of psycho-autobiographical tricks sure comes in handy.

In the end, the punchline is that Boy’s family is black, too. I have no idea what the fuck this is really all about and I doubt anyone else does, either. No one save for Jerry Lewis himself, that is. Presumably it would have to mean… something, wouldn’t it?